Where hijab meets closed gates

This is not the first time girls with guns challenge the French state. What's new is that these girls are not even from a Muslim family.

Lila and Alma Lévy-Omari are sisters. They are the daughters of a non-practicing Jewish father and a Kabyle mother – baptized into Catholicism, but as non-religious as her husband.

It is a mystery to both mother and father, and to the whole of French society, how Lila and Alma could decide to become Muslims. But they are Muslims. When school in her hometown Aubervilliers started up again after the summer holidays this year, Lila and Alma showed up in hijab – the classic Muslim headdress that covers both hair, neck, neck and shoulders. After a few weeks of general dismay and heated discussion, it went with Lila and Alma as it has done with so many other Muslim girls: they were thrown out.

So far, so good. Or: so far, not so good. For the case of Lila and Alma has brought back the panic anxiety that characterizes a French secularism under attack. The question is: how is it possible to combine the demands of the secular state with the desire of French Muslims for identity?

Went their own way

Seen from the outside, it is strange how France has managed to make a huge trauma out of something that all other countries manage to live with in an absolutely excellent way. To find the answer, one has to go back almost a hundred years.

In 1905, church and state were divided in France. This did not mean that the state moved into a role as a neutral guardian and passive spectator of the country's religious life. This meant that the state got rid of its religion – Catholicism – completely.

Since 1905, the church has had nothing to do with the state, and the state has had nothing to do with the church. The divide is total, and secularism is the prevailing ideology.

One could almost call it a religion, as the secular ideology stands in France. The French word is laity, and it gives vibrations all the way back to the revolution and the first republic in 1789.

One consequence of secularism is that the school does not allow any emphasis on the religious. Curriculum and dress code, teachers and students are required to stay within strictly secular norms, as has always been done. Yet the secular school has not been a problem. Anyone who wanted to associate with religion, or a life in it, could take their education – lower and higher – within the Catholic institutions.

It worked perfectly well until 1989, when the first Muslim girls came to class with their hair covered. It happened in Creil, and the expulsion of the two went all the way to the top of the court system. The ruling could have been taken from the oracle in Delphi. The var allowed to wear religious symbols at school (a small cross in a piece of jewelry, for example) but not in such a way that it seemed provocative or missionary, or in any way undermined the student's freedom and dignity.

It was up to the schools to decide for themselves. Throughout the 90s, Muslim girls in hijabs stood in front of closed school gates, with good media coverage, while teachers argued about practices and principles and the state shook hands and pointed to established traditions.

It could not last.

A difficult minority

What is the thing really? Not so much the fact that there are six million Muslims in France who have the right to practice their own religion. The Catholics have always had that right, and the Muslims have also had that right. 25 years ago, there were ten to twelve mosques and Muslim places of worship in France. Today there are many thousands. There are few in France who get excited about it.

But two demands stand as relentless absolutes as far as France's immigrants and their descendants are concerned: they should not live in culturally and / or physically separated ghettos, as seen in Britain and Germany – experiences the French shudder over.

And they should definitely not tamper with the state's outdated, pre-modern and oppressive mindset that France got rid of – for good, it was thought – more than two hundred years ago. There are borders for everything, even in France.

In the 90s, the debate took a new turn. For it was girls like Lila and Alma – intellectually upbeat and politically conscious – who wore the hijab. French girls, born and raised as they are in the country, began wearing the headscarf or hijab at a young age and continued to wear it as an adult. Where the mothers had refused to wear the headscarf; indeed, had struggled to free themselves from it, their daughters adopted the religious symbols. They had become practicing Muslims, and they demanded respect for their new identity.

It changed everything. Because where Catholics could take their religion under their arm and go to their own schools, Muslims had no alternative. Besides, they were not interested in any other school. When they moved to the mosques to get their education there, it was only because they had been expelled from the French public school. Not that they sought religious compensation.

So the situation was this: the Muslim girls wanted to go to their regular school. The teachers wanted them there, so as not to "lose them completely to religion" or to political Islamism for that matter. But the girls would go with the hijab and the teachers would not. It was more than an argument about headgear. For many French teachers – and more with them – it was the very basis of existence for the school that was at stake. The French secular state was under attack from the religion for the first time since the revolution. The teachers stormed out into the streets in defense of the republic, nothing less.

Eventually the noise subsided. The girls proved impossible to defeat. If the hijab was banned at their school, they wore a small scarf. To the extent possible, they covered themselves. In the end, it all just got ridiculous. For if the hijab is forbidden as a religious garment; so should a headband worn on religious grounds also be banned?

Lila and Alma trampled on an increasing pragmatism throughout the hijab issue. Now the battle is back. – I hate the idea that other girls, who do not wear the hijab, should feel that something is missing in their attire, says a teacher to the newspaper The world. And what do Lila and Alma say?

Debate on secularism

"Wearing a hijab is not contrary to secularism," Lila told French newspapers. – It is on the contrary a personal expression of my religion, and should not prevent me from getting an education.

Many agree. The French school is secular, it sounds unanimous. But you can not take away from students the right to be religious, others think further. It is the state, and not society, that is secular. It is the school, and not the students, that should be required.

But can a state with six million Muslims; ten percent of the population and growing, at all be secular? Implied: when Islam as a religion seeks to break into the institutions of the state, because that is what Islam does, can one then preserve the French, secular state?

The heretical thought has not taken root at all. French secularism is entrenched, says President Jacques Chirac. But something else has emerged in the last year. And that is how to define secularism; what are its limits.

The result has been the Stasi. Stasi, as in Bernard Stasi – the head of the commission to assess French secularism.

Think about it – that France has set up a separate group to assess the secular state. It's skyrocketing in a country that has always had a romantic relationship with the republic and the legacy of 1789.

But the French state has had to acknowledge that it has a large Muslim minority in its midst. It has struggled with itself, and with the outgrowths of Islam, for many years. Last year, the body that France had lacked came: the Council for the Muslim Faith, on which there were elections.

It gave a majority to the radical Islamists in the UOIF with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. But as Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said: it is better to have them above ground than below.

Now, over a year later, the nation is preparing for a debate on secularism. The French president has said he will speak to the nation about this before Christmas. It is possible that the ruling from 1989 on hijab in schools will fall. Hardline secularists and rebellious Muslims are waiting in breathless excitement.